Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

damitr writes "With a lot of fanfare the Indian Government had launched a $35 tablet named Aakash (The Sky). Despite skepticism, the government went ahead with the project. But delays in production and deployment of the tablet have left the project in risk of failure. The manufacturer has been unable to supply the required 100,000 units, and a deadline of March 31 has been set. The new minister Pallam Raju says: 'Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem.'"
For what it's worth, they did manage to ship 17,000 of them. It looks like meeting the deadline is impossible and the $35 tablet is dead.

Curiously, they handed it to a London-headquartered Canadian firm [wikipedia.org](with a slightly... unenviable... reputation for order fulfillment), who then handed the manufacturing side back to an Indian firm [quadelectronics.com]. No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...

Looks like everybody is out to demonstrate how good they are at outsourcing. Just wait until the Chinese and Africans too get in on the act - then we might see jobs coming back to the US

And the Indian government was involved in creating a tablet because....?

The Indian government's interest in all this had something to do with an e-textbook initiative. Apparently their dead-tree versions are seriously uneven in terms of age and availability, so the prospect of something that could be updated more easily and be all 21st century and stuff was attractive.

What is somewhat less clear is why this got them involved in hardware, rather than just software and content. There are only about a zillion Chinese OEMs slitting each other's throats to build slightly cheaper crap-tablets, and many of them produce quite similar designs around a handful of cheap SoCs. Sure, doing platform validation is a pain in the ass; but they could have had multiple, interchangeable, vendors eating out of the palm of their hand instead of having one pet fuckup...

No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...

At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" [fisher-price.com] (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat [wikipedia.org]? Melamine [wikipedia.org]?

I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."

$35 was the target subsidized price. The target actual price was around twice that(which is pretty much the going rate [dx.com] for 7 inch tablets of unknown-but-suspect quality from nameless pacific rim OEMS).

Call center help, no problem. Manufacturing, problem. I just returned from India (forgive me those of you in India reading this right now), but highly efficient manufacturing is not what India is known for. Got to China to get it built fast and cheap. India has other strengths.

At an expected price of only $35, one should expect what has happened.

You can currently source a capacitive multitouch ICS device with a camera and fast SoC from eBay for $65 delivered to your door, first-world, quantity one. Could an order of 100,000 units with a resistive screen, without any middlemen get that down to $35? It seems entirely do-able. It's not going to be a great device, but better than no device.

That's the opposite of "you get what you paid for." It's called "Marketing."

I think you misunderstood. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 190a: "When you don't get what you think you paid for, then you paid for marketing, and you got what paid for." It's a sub-rule of Rule 190: "Hear all, trust nothing."

If the government don't buy them,I am sure hobbyists and hackers around the world would find use for them if they were only $35 each.

You wouldn't be able to sell them to individuals for $35 - Supply chains, distribution, packaging, returns, payment processing... All would drive up the cost. Price point would probably be $79 or so which, surprise surprise, is what a cheapo consumer Chinese tablet sells for.

How much of that failure can be attributed to a filthy corrput government and poor management of resources?

Being from another country run by a highy corrupt government (Brazil), I'm pretty sure that this $35 tablet was never meant to exist as a real product. It was only a sophisticated money laudring scheme with a few prototypes to show for it.

You nailed it! I am from India and was thinking the exact same thing.
Now that the minister whose 'pet project' this scam was has moved onto another one, the new guy want's to shut it down. I am sure he will find some other less fancy money making scheme.
Note: This is called a money making scheme, not laundering. (Laundering is when you use a business to make your illegitimate money as legitimate as possible.)
(Sorry I haven't yet figured out how to up vote comments, or am I allowed to?)

There is no shortage of low end tablets. A 35 dollar tablet is just going to carry the same stigma as the Coby and Archos products. I wouldn't even give these devices to a kid as a toy because they're buggy and barely have the specs to run Android.

People who can't shell out for an iPad have plenty of mid-range tablets to choose from by Asus, Samsung and Sony, not to mention the Kindle Fire is a pretty decent tablet when rooted and flashed with Cyanogen.

They outsourced management to some first world company (ok, most likely it was an international bidding that was 'won' by some first world company), who outsourced production to India, where the outsourcer decided it's cheaper to outsource to China, and they caught on by now too and the whole deal ended up being assembled somewhere in Africa.

Keep dumping wages, countries of the first world, maybe some time we will become the outsource center of Africa! So we can then build the tablets, ship them through Afr